Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Papa's got a brand new bag

Two of them actually, M-bags, the cheapest way in the world to have large volumes of comics shipped over vast distances...Click here for more info.IF all goes well....IF....If.....if
Now, I've had over 30 M-bags sent to me over the years and all arrive in perfect shape and all take between 6 & 9 weeks...but some of them have trouble at customs. You see importing comics in my country should be duty-free as they are basically used books, but due to some reason, comics are not considered books and I end up paying 30% duty on the value + shipping.
A friendly customs official told me that I just had to have the seller write "gift" on the customs label and make the value lower than $25.00 and everything would be perfect...Well the 2 M-bags that reached me this week ended up costing me over $20.00 each in duty. You see the first one had the customs slip filled in perfectly, but the sender's local post office dimwit told him to fix the customs slip on the box INSIDE the M-bag and not on the M-bag. Big mistake, customs want to see the label in under 5 seconds or they pull the item (you're still my boy Chrisco...hehe)
The other M-bag was sent to me by Mile High comics and for some strange reason they refuse to put customs slips on their M-bags, result, bag got pulled and I got charged another $25.00...
This is the third time in five Mile High have pulled this stunt...and I'm pretty fed up with them. Tomorrow I'm going-a-searching for a new TPB dealer that can give me good prices and knows how to ship items properly

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't know what they're worth but I saw that Lone Star Comics (mycomicshop.com) offered a free shipping formula for their orders now.

"If shipping outside the US and Canada you will receive free shipping on at least 30 comics when you place an order of $100 or more. At $100 you get free shipping on 30 comics, and for every additional $3.33 you spend above $100 you get free shipping on an additional comic. For example, if you placed an order for $150 you would get free shipping on 45 comics (150 / 3.33 = 45). This means that if the average price of the items in your order is $3.33 or more, you get free shipping on your entire order.

For international orders free shipping is not available if your order contains any items other than comics and graphic novels."

...Sounds tricky, you'd have to mix a bunch of cheap comics + TPBs for it to work out, I guess.